Assessing the behavioral pattern of tourism supply and demand Based on the Changes of the Capitalist System (Case: Karaj City and Surrounding Villages)

Planning for development of tourism always requires concern for supply and demand. At the same time, tourism marketing relies particularly on knowledge of the characteristics of supply and demand. The significance of the present study could be explained by the issue of the changing world and its effects on tourism, where important changes have long been observed in tourism form the aspects of supply and demand, which accounts for the need to review the parallel management and marketing practices. Unlike studies that have been conducted so far, this research considered the results of the developments made in capitalism to assess the supply and demand behavior in tourism. This provided a useful theoretical framework for establishment of marketing activities for tourism development. For that purpose, the supply and demand behavior patterns in tourism were assessed based on the changes made in capitalism in the city of Karaj, Iran and the surrounding villages. The tourism demand dimension was defined using three components: planning, products, and characteristics. The dimension of tourism supply was defined as a combination of four economic components: planning, products, structure, and function. In addition, criteria were considered for each of the components of tourism supply and demand. The population of this quantitative research included experts in the field, also including the local community, who were surveyed as two categories: that of residents of Karaj and surrounding villages, as travel demanders, and that of travel companies in Karaj, as travel suppliers. The experts were sampled using the targeted and convenience sampling methods, the residents were sampled using the simple random sampling method, and the travel companies were sampled using the complete enumeration method. The findings of the study were presented in two broad phases. In the first phase, the method of analytic hierarchy process was used to specify the importance and priority of the factors based on the expert opinions. In the second phase, the scale of measurement and the formulation of the items were introduced for assessment of the criteria identified in tourism destinations, and two proposed maps were then used for description and analysis of the coefficients obtained from the assessment of the criteria. The results demonstrated that the behavior patterns of travel demanders were different from the residents of Karaj to those of the surrounding villages. Accordingly, the behavior of the latter group of residents was inclined to the characteristics of Fordism- post-Fordism tourism, with a weighted mean of 0.521, while the behavior pattern of the residents of Karaj exhibited inclination to the characteristics of post-Fordism tourism, with a weighted mean of 0.711. On the other hand, the behavior pattern of travel companies in Karaj was inclined to the characteristics of post-Fordism tourism, with a weighted mean of 0.751. Overall, the behavior pattern of tourism supply and demand in Karaj was assessed as post-Fordism. According to the above findings, marketing activities can be more effective, and tourism development planning can be directed as desired through identification and analysis of the characteristics of tourism supply and demand in the study areas.